In conventional mobile systems, multiple processors may act as individual gateways in a single chassis. Each of these gateways may send its own system accounting messages when that gateway processor reloads or shuts down. Conventional approaches to improve manageability include providing a single Internet protocol (IP) view of all gateways in the chassis to external nodes, such as a RADIUS (remote authentication dial-in user service) server, serving GPRS (general packet radio service) support node (SGSN), etc. In such an environment, one of the processors may be used as a RADIUS proxy, and all gateway processors can send RADIUS messages to the RADIUS proxy server, which in turn can forward such messages to an actual RADIUS server.
While this conventional approach may work well for session level accounting messages, it may not work well for system accounting messages. For example, when one of the gateway processors reloads, it can send an “accounting ON” message to the proxy, but it may not be desirable for the proxy to forward this message to the actual RADIUS server because the whole chassis has not reloaded. In addition, it is desirable for the RADIUS server to clean up the user sessions belonging to the gateway processor that reloaded.